hmm, until recently I was plagued by the fact that I couldn't use compressed textures in q3 based games.



Everytime I aplied the stc3 compression fix (NVMax, GTU or Rivatuner) I could not run Q3 based games with texture compression turn on on my XP machine.



I got bluescreens with "nv4disp.dll" as the main cause of the error. (Infinite loop problem I guess).



Well I changed 1 bios setting on my Abit-Be6 II (1.0).

It's intel 440BX based.



I changed "passive release" to disabled,

this has something to do with the PIIX to release the control of the ISA-bus steering.

And in a way this also messes arround with your PCI-bus setting and that secondly messes with your AGP-bus and Memory etc...

This setting is usually found in the memory or PCI-bus setting, where you can also change your AGP apperture size, look it up in your motherboard manual.



I do not have lockups anymore with this set to disabled, and I thought you guys would like to know about it.



I know from experience that VIA and SiS and other Chipset manufactures have this setting too.



Maybe, and I do say maybe, you, the Nvidia infinite loop lockup experiencing guy or girl , could try and find out if this setting is turned on or enabled in your BIOS and turn it off or disable it.

Remember I only had this problem with stc3 fix turned on in the registry.



I do hope this'll help you... it did for me.

Taken from this site.



-----------

Passive Release



Options : Enabled, Disabled



Because the ISA bus is so much slower than the PCI bus, any device engaging the ISA bus normally renders the PCI bus inaccessible to the CPU. But with Passive Release enabled, CPU-to-PCI bus accesses are allowed via passive release of the PCI bus. It does so with the use of the chipset's embedded 32-bit posted write buffer.



The write buffer stores the PCI writes from the CPU when the ISA bus is being accessed. The data is then written to the PCI bus by passive release. Therefore, the processor can still access the PCI bus even when the ISA bus is being accessed.



Otherwise, the arbiter will only accept another PCI master access to local DRAM. In other words, only another PCI bus master can access the PCI bus, not the processor. This feature is used to meet the latency of the ISA bus master, which is much longer than that of the PCI bus master.



Enable Passive Release for optimal performance. Disable it only if you are facing problems with your ISA cards.

------------------------



I dont know who experiences this infinite loop stuff (I havent seen it yet), but this wont even apply to people who dont have chipsets that are that old.



I also know almost -nothing- about how the graphics subsystem works, or how quake3 works (game blows), but Im fairly sure that opengl doesn't use texture compression (but D3D does). Does quake3 use opengl? Could that be the problem? shrug

OpenGL Video Information





Renderer Information

Manufacturer NVIDIA Corporation

Renderer GeForce2 GTS/AGP/SSE

Version 1.3.1

Acceleration Yes, Hardware ICD





OpenGL Extensions

GL_ARB_imaging Yes

GL_ARB_multitexture Yes

GL_ARB_texture_compression Yes

GL_ARB_texture_cube_map Yes

GL_ARB_texture_env_add Yes

GL_ARB_texture_env_combine Yes

GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3 Yes

GL_ARB_transpose_matrix Yes

GL_S3_s3tc Yes

GL_EXT_abgr Yes

GL_EXT_bgra Yes

GL_EXT_blend_color Yes

GL_EXT_blend_minmax Yes

GL_EXT_blend_subtract Yes

GL_EXT_clip_volume_hint Yes

GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array Yes

GL_EXT_draw_range_elements Yes

GL_EXT_fog_coord Yes

GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays Yes

GL_EXT_packed_pixels Yes

GL_EXT_paletted_texture Yes

GL_EXT_point_parameters Yes

GL_EXT_rescale_normal Yes

GL_EXT_secondary_color Yes

GL_EXT_separate_specular_color Yes

GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette Yes

GL_EXT_stencil_wrap Yes

GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc Yes

GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp Yes

GL_EXT_texture_env_add Yes

GL_EXT_texture_env_combine Yes

GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3 Yes

GL_EXT_texture_cube_map Yes

GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic Yes

GL_EXT_texture_lod Yes

GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias Yes

GL_EXT_texture_object Yes

GL_EXT_vertex_array Yes

GL_EXT_vertex_weighting Yes

GL_IBM_texture_mirrored_repeat Yes

GL_KTX_buffer_region Yes

GL_NV_blend_square Yes

GL_NV_evaluators Yes

GL_NV_fence Yes

GL_NV_fog_distance Yes

GL_NV_light_max_exponent Yes

GL_NV_packed_depth_stencil Yes

GL_NV_register_combiners Yes

GL_NV_texgen_emboss Yes

GL_NV_texgen_reflection Yes

GL_NV_texture_env_combine4 Yes

GL_NV_texture_rectangle Yes

GL_NV_vertex_array_range Yes

GL_NV_vertex_array_range2 Yes

GL_NV_vertex_program Yes

GL_NV_vertex_program1_1 Yes

GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap Yes

GL_SGIS_multitexture Yes

GL_SGIS_texture_lod Yes

GL_WIN_swap_hint Yes

WGL_EXT_swap_control Yes



OpenGL was practically invented with texure compression in mind....

D3D sucks on performance...



Dets v.4 (20.xx ++) mess about with BUSmaster/DMA and stuff to gain performance over the older dets v.3 (6.xx ++)....